Sewing Spectacular Part 1: Covid Quilt Challenge #15 Part 1

This past weekend was a sewing spectacular. My friend and I both took time off work to have an extra long weekend. That meant we decided that we could fit two quilt challenges into one weekend. (Fit is a relative term, as you might know from your pants :P - I still have a few stitches to do in my last challenge quilt).

One thing that was different about this challenge was that we knew we wanted to do it in person. However, we usually work separately in our own spaces with our own resources. So we had to plan to enable shared time/space. That meant on Thursday night right after work we skyped to pick our technique and do some planning. The technique we drew this time was "fancy stitches" - time to dig out our sewing machine manuals to see what our machines could do :).

We put my friend's sister in charge of our colour scheme (I thought a colour scheme would help me narrow down what I needed to take to my friend's place in the morning). I think she was heavily influenced by her 4 year old, since we got "rainbow" as our colour scheme. It was a particularly satisfying project to pull fabrics for :).

I had trouble narrowing down the ideas I had, and we had no other plans, so I got over-ambitious and ended up completing 3 projects. One of the down-sides of working together in person was that we weren't taking pictures to send to each other, so I am lacking progress pictures.

For the first project I decided to do a row of rainbow colours with black/white stitching. As I was sketching it out, I decided that I would do 2 rows of rainbow colours in opposite directions - one light and one dark. I also decided to pull fabrics from my small and medium scrap pile and not dig into my bigger pieces, and to use fabrics with a pattern on them (I had a different plan for my solids).

And I even managed to find a backing fabric in my medium scrap bin that I decided would be perfect - rainbows live in the sky :).

Based on the size I wanted I decided to double one of the colours in each row. I didn't want it to be the same colour on both sides and I was trying to keep yellow from lining up with itself, so I picked orange on the dark side and blue on the light side. However, I didn't think through the fact that that meant that the double colours would line up (2 blues across from 2 orange). It wouldn't have been my first choice if I had carefully planned everything out, but I think it worked out fine.

On the dark colours I used white thread, and on the light colours I used black thread. At first I thought the black was going to be too stark of a contrast, so I tried a dark grey, but in the end it didn't contrast enough, so I went with black.

On the dark side, I tried to balance dense stitching with lighter stitching. On the light side, I tried to balance straight line stitches with curved line stitches.

This actually ended up being the last one I added the binding too. I decided that it would be fun to have the binding split like the quilt was. Plus that gave me an opportunity to try something new :). I ended up going both directions on the machine so I didn't have to have another seam on such a small project. However, that really gave my brain a workout to figure out how to mitre the corners in reverse :D. 

For my second project, I decided to do a colour matching of the thread and the fabric. I did another row of rainbow colours in order. This time I separated them with white (which I had plans for :)). I was very excited when I was pulling fabrics that I had mottled fabric in every colour except red (that part was disappointing). Then I remembered I had a block kit from a number of years ago that was mostly red fabrics - I checked and sure enough it had some in the kit, so out it came (it can easily be replaced with another red). I pieced my mottled fabrics with my white separators, and then added a solid black backing. I wanted the coloured thread to really pop on the back.

In the white parts, I did a zig-zag satin stitch in the colour to the left of it (except I only did 1 blue version of this so I could get a purple zig-zag in too). I then picked a stitch for each colour that I did 2 rows of.

I put some thought into which direction I wanted the stitch to face if it was directional. I also tried to use stitches I hadn't used in my first project. 

This one I gave a black rainbow polka dot binding to, mostly because I thought it would look good with the back, and I was right. I'm not sure if it enhances the front or not, but it's grown on me on the front and I really like it on the back (which I feel like can be the front sometimes :)).

I'm going to switch to my friend's second project now, because it fits into the category of  "row of rainbow colours" that my first 2 projects also fit into.

My friend chose to use 2 fabrics for each colour - one solid and one patterned.

She then added a white border all the way around, and chose thread colours to "match" the colour they were stitching on. She tried to pick thread that was the same colour, but contrasted enough to still be nicely seen - which was harder than it sounds. Some thread that seemed like it would contrast really just blended in. She chose to have the stitching go all the way through the coloured fabric and extend out into the white border, which is a really nice effect. 

She chose to use a bright blue binding - same "sky" idea as the back I chose on mine. 

And as you can see, hers is also nicely double-sided.

This turned out to be a great project to do together so that we could supply share. We did a tiny bit of fabric swapping, but where it was most helpful was thread and bobbins - there was a lot of sharing going on :D. 

This feels like a long enough post as-is. I will show my last project and my friend's first project in another post :).